We have identified demographic scenarios that can lead to the contrasting phylogenies observed for the major Y-chromosomal lineages that expanded during the distinct Neolithic transitions in Europe and Africa. These suggest that in Europe, the R1b lineage experienced an extremely rapid and extensive increase as soon as it entered the continent, expanding more than a thousandfold in a few generations. The expansion in Africa began from a larger population size, took thousands of years and ended only recently.

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If we had used the more likely 4 to 5 KYA estimate of the R1b TMRCA from the rho statistic [18], the expansion in the current model would have been placed close to this time, well within the Neolithic and, interestingly, also close to the time of establishment of the major European mtDNA haplogroup, H, approximately 6 KYA [7,8]. The rapidity of the R1b expansion and the large increase in population size are most consistent with migration and population replacement, issues debated by archaeologists but favored by the aDNA data [5-9].

This paper was brought to my attention by Heber over in the L21 subforum.

At the recent Family Tree DNA Conference in Houston, Dr. Hammer said that L11 expanded throughout Europe about 5k years ago. Here is a quote from a recent article describing Dr. Hammer's talk:

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. . . This evidence supports a recent spread of haplogroup R lineages in western Europe about 5K years ago. This also supports evidence that P311 moved into Europe after the Neolithic agricultural transition and nearly displaced the previously existing western European Neolithic Y, which appears to be G2a.

This same pattern does not extrapolate to mitochondrial DNA where there is continuity.

What conferred advantage to these post Neolithic men? What was that advantage?

Dr. Hammer then grouped the major subgroups of haplogroup R-P3111 [sic] and found the following clusters.

U106 is clustered in GermanyL21 clustered in the British IslesU152 has an Alps epicenter . . .

At the recent Family Tree DNA Conference in Houston, Dr. Hammer said that L11 expanded throughout Europe about 5k years ago. Here is a quote from a recent article describing Dr. Hammer's talk:

Quote

. . . This evidence supports a recent spread of haplogroup R lineages in western Europe about 5K years ago. This also supports evidence that P311 moved into Europe after the Neolithic agricultural transition and nearly displaced the previously existing western European Neolithic Y, which appears to be G2a.

This same pattern does not extrapolate to mitochondrial DNA where there is continuity.

What conferred advantage to these post Neolithic men? What was that advantage?

Dr. Hammer then grouped the major subgroups of haplogroup R-P3111 [sic] and found the following clusters.

U106 is clustered in GermanyL21 clustered in the British IslesU152 has an Alps epicenter . . .

The author of the article linked in post #2 above asks, "What conferred advantage to these post Neolithic men? What was that advantage?"

Here is something from the book, Gaelic and Gaelicised Ireland during the Middle Ages, by Kenneth Nicholls, that could help answer that question. It was first posted by Paul Duffy in the L21 subforum here. Although it deals with the top-down expansion in medieval Ireland, I think the same principle could easily (and probably accurately) be applied to the rapid expansion of R1b in Europe 4k-5k years ago.

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One of the most important phenomena in a clan-based society is that of expansion from the top downwards. The seventeenth-century Irish scholar and genealogist Dualtagh Mac Firbisigh remarked that 'as the sons and families of the rulers multiplied, so their subjects and followers were squeezed out and withered away'; and this phenomenon, the expansion of the ruling or dominant stocks at the expense of the remainder, is a normal feature in societies of this type. It has been observed of the modern Basotho of South Africa that 'there is a constant displacement of commoners by royals [i.e. members of the royal clan] and of collateral royals by the direct descendants of the ruling prince', and this could have been said, without adaptation, of any important Gaelic or Gaelicized lordship of late medieval Ireland. In Fermanagh, for example, the kingship of the Maguires began only with the accession of Donn Mór in 1282 and the ramification of the family - with the exception of one or two small and territorially unimportant septs - began with the sons of the same man. The spread of his descendants can be seen by the genealogical tract called Geinelaighe Fhearmanach; by 1607 they must have been in the possession of at least three-quarters of the total soil of Fermanagh, having displaced or reduced the clans which had previously held it. The rate at which an Irish clan could multiply itself must not be underestimated. Turlough an fhíona O'Donnell, lord of Tirconnell (d. 1423) had eighteen sons (by ten different women) and fifty-nine grandsons in the male line. Mulmora O'Reilly, the lord of East Brefny, who died in 1566, had at least fifty-eight O'Reilly grandsons. Philip Maguire, lord of Fermanagh (d. 1395) had twenty sons by eight mothers, and we know of at least fifty grandsons. Oliver Burke of Tirawley (two of whose sons became Lower Mac William although he himself had never held that position) left at least thirty-eight grandsons in the male line. Irish law drew no distinction in matters of inheritance between the legitimate and the illegitimate and permitted the affiliation of children by their mother's declaration (see Chapter 4), and the general sexual permissiveness of medieval Irish society must have allowed a rate of multiplication approaching that which is permitted by the polygyny practised in, for instance, the clan societies of southern Africa already cited.